Building a (post) quantum future.

Part of the folklore and appeal of the startup scene is the ‘garage culture’. Think Apple, Amazon, Google - all started in someone’s mum's garage. An upgrade from the garage is the story of how three guys went from renting mattresses in their San Francisco living room to building Airbnb, a multi-billion dollar company. Definitely *not* an upgrade from the garage is the basement. A windowless basement, with no phone signal and regular water leaks from British rain. And like every good startup story, attuned to your grandpa’s war stories, this is where my nearly 3 year long journey with Oxford Quantum Circuits – OQC – started. The story of an all-consuming addiction to building bleeding-edge tech, a world-class team, a values-driven brand, and ambitious partnerships that would propel OQC from a research group to Europe’s leading quantum computing company.

But first, ‘You’re on mute’

Thankfully, the basement period of OQC didn’t last too long. That would have been too easy. Instead, in March 2020 the UK went into lockdown. COVID-19 was spreading fast and the team was ready to go remote. I watered the (one) office plant sufficiently for until when ‘we’d back in 2 weeks’ (I can confirm that to lead a startup you have to be optimistic, naive and adaptable in equal measures!). We never returned to the basement.?

We worked from home, bought gamer-like office chairs, and got sick and tired of Zoom. We heard things like ‘Judge, I guarantee you, I am not a cat’; ‘You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver’; and of course the infamous ‘You’re on mute’. We moved to the countryside, redecorated, bought so many plants, and either became body-builders (the incredible Kajsa Eriksson Rosenqvist is ready for a reconversion as a Peloton instructor) or gained uncontrolled weight (hello, Nutella), there was no middle-ground. I organised Friday-fun meetings. Narrator: they were actually not always fun. And after a few weeks my colleagues wondered if I had lost it when I showed off with my quantum-branded toilet paper (for those abroad, the Brits went crazy for TP during lockdown, weirdos). We got married ( Dr Waqas Ahmad ’ outfits will never be rivalled), got babies, dogs and cats, and received (online) PhDs. #quarantinelife

From a patent and a laptop to Europe’s leading quantum company

And then, fin.al.ly, we met again. We had grown from 5 to 30 people. Most of us had never met IRL. It was a thing of beauty. We had a new office (with windows) and after months of tedious work, we launched the UK’s first commercial quantum lab. It was an incredible milestone. One which would fuel us further and faster than anyone expected.?

I had been hired to accelerate OQC’s go-to market strategy and growth of the company through sales, partnerships, and customer success. It was time to shine.?

We won a landmark grant to boost quantum technologies in the UK (good luck Richard Pearson , only 11 months left!) and launched Europe’s first quantum computer-as-a service, Sophia*. We partnered with Amazon and launched Lucy* on AWS Braket, a first in Europe. We even let hackers test our systems at Defcon30 ( Tom Winchester went full ‘burner phone’ mode and stopped breathing for a little while when we launched). Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced the world’s first quantum computer in a colocation center , in partnership with the incredible team at Cyxtera. Finally, I loved working with colleagues at the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), who last week announced the creation of the Open Quantum Institute (OQI).

OQC is now Europe’s leading quantum computing as-a-service company. And because this is not enough, we raised $47m, the UK’s largest deep tech Series A , to fuel our growth further afield (こんにちは, Japan). Yes, I still have nightmares and palpitations about the due diligence (yes I got asked what the cost of our office’s carpet repair would be in the event we left).

Making Sophia, Lucy and Ailsa international rock stars

?When I joined OQC, I also took on the role of revamping our communication and marketing efforts to tell the company’s story to the world. I loved every minute of building OQC’s brand into a household (quantum) name, nowadays regularly mentioned alongside IBM, Google, Honeywell and Microsoft.?

I refined our message, brushed up our pitches, redesigned our website and celebrated our 15x increase on Twitter and Linkedin (eternal thanks to the 20+ followers who like every single one of our posts (hello, Shaun Geaney, PhD ). * I suggested we named our quantum computers after groundbreaking women in STEM, and this is how Sophia (after Sophia Jex-Blake ) and Lucy (after Lucy Mensing ) made their debut. I can’t wait for everyone to hear about their little sisters.?

I couldn’t be prouder of having nominated Ilana Wisby , Kajsa Eriksson Rosenqvist , Kowsar Shahbazi , Renuka Devi Pothuraju and Charlie Dale for tech awards and seeing them receive the recognition they deserve. But the biggest star I might have inadvertently created is Ailsa Keyser , one of OQC’s fantastic quantum engineers, who appears on every press article, quantum news and blog, and is the face of the latest UK Great Campaign for science and technology. (No pressure, Ailsa).

Supporting women in tech is something I care deeply about: we sponsored a number of ‘diversity in tech events’ and this is how I met Maria Violaris, DPhil , Lorraine Tsitsi Majiri and even snapped the fabulous Dr. Ines Juvan-Beaulieu who is now part of the BD team at OQC. This is also how I met Seher U?urcuklu , whom I mentored as part of the Keysight Technologies programme and is now thriving as a Data Scientist.?

Alone you go fast, together you go far

As business leaders we recognise that to succeed we not only have to do things right, we also have to do the right things. In the last 3 years, I have had a lot of time to do a lot of things not so right, and the chance to do a few things better than I imagined.?

I prepared our team for fast-paced scale. Not just by growing the business from 5 to 70 people, but by giving our people some of the tools to succeed. One of them is training sessions, countless of them: 1-1s best practices, recruitment, comms, confidentiality & need-to-know, intellectual property, project management, etc. And it always makes me smile when a colleague manages to get out of a tricky line of questions with a smart answer. If you ask anyone at OQC today how many fridges there are, 99% chance they will say “Enough to keep us busy”. Maybe this will be my legacy.?

We also focused a lot of attention on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Within a month of starting at OQC I had drafted the company’s DEI statement and implemented a series of measures to ensure we were not just talking the talk but also walking the walk: CVs are fully anonymised when candidates apply for a role, role descriptions are gender-neutral, everyone receives unconscious bias training, etc. A small victory I am incredibly proud of recently: after weeks of negotiations I managed to convince the University of Reading (23,000 students, no less) to update its policy on the use of its bathrooms, such that the bathrooms in our office building (owned by the University) became gender-neutral. The mission is by no means over, it’s only a small step, but one that means everyone is truly welcome here.

Doing the right thing is also ensuring a sustainable future for all. Last year we pledged carbon neutrality . This year we measured, reduced and offset our emissions and our selected Gold Standard project not only supports more sustainable sources of electricity for the local populations, it also finances a community health centre, scholarship opportunities, and (close to our hearts) a computer training centre.

Always punch above your weight

The moral of this story, maybe, is to always punch above your weight. I knew nothing about quantum when I joined OQC. And yet, passion, grit, resilience, stubbornness and all the things in between have enabled me to enjoy this multifaceted COO role and to shape, build and scale OQC into the leading company it is today.?

As always, none of this would have been possible without the incredible people who have jumped on this roller-coaster with me. OQC is 70 strong these days, and all deserve to be celebrated. But the Ops team in particular has been incredible all along: Natasha Keane for providing the best recruitment experience to our candidates, Marve Mya Canaltay for ensuring that we stayed safe during COVID and that we had the best parties since we returned; Gillian Steele for keeping me alive, for organising our events and for bringing so much energy to the office by simply wearing the most outstanding shoes; Kaitlyn Jannetta for giving everyone the warmest of welcomes to the team and nailing the on-boarding experience; Charles Prochazka for managing all our PITA projects*, from carbon management to cybersecurity (*he might have raised an eyebrow the first time I named them as such, but has since then embraced them all); Hervien Y. for helping me negotiate the legals surrounding some of our largest and most complex deals; Dr. Ines Juvan-Beaulieu and Gerald Mullally who are taking over our partnerships; Michelle Sheppard , Ilona Kozlowska and Marco Zaratiegui , for mastering numbers, pivot tables, audits, and management accounts better than anyone. Soon, Kateryna and Cathy will join the team as well and I wish them to best of luck. I am leaving knowing they are ready to help OQC push harder and dream bigger.?

Special mention finally to Phil whose limbo dancing definitely deserves a Guiness record; to Tawfik , Andrew Lennard , Chris J, Tom Dixon , Apoorva Hegde , Brian Vlastakis , Connor Shelly (the big one), Norbert Deak , Harry Waring, PhD and Kajsa Eriksson Rosenqvist , whose messages as I left made me realise we’d built something truly special. The list wouldn’t be complete without Simon Phillips - S(P)P - who is 50% genius, 50% crazy, and 50% exhausted, without whom I couldn’t imagine having done this; and Ilana Wisby who trusted me with all these responsibilities and many more, what a ride!

Everyone else - I love you too. Thanks for letting me take that journey with you.?

And now excited to build my post quantum future. (Pun intended).

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